Robert Elsmere

Robert Elsmere, a young, idealistic clergyman, marries the deeply religious Catherine Leyburn and takes up a parish in the Surrey countryside. There, through the library of the sceptical local squire and his own study of history, he comes to doubt the miracles of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ. Unable to remain a priest, he resigns, to his wife's anguish, moves to London and founds a 'New Brotherhood' to serve the working people of the East End, while their marriage is tested by the gulf between his new faith and hers.

Mrs Humphry Ward (1851–1920), a niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, published the novel in 1888, and it became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic; the former prime minister Gladstone wrote a long review attacking its ideas. It captures the Victorian crisis of faith. Compare George Eliot's Middlemarch and Newman's account of a conversion in the opposite direction, Apologia Pro Vita Sua.